I just happened to be reading an old article about it and it peaked my interest. I guess not too many people (even statisticians) were too familiar with it up until 10-15 years ago, but it is getting very popular as it is being used to detect fraud in corporations, tax documents, etc. by simply looking at the numbers involved.

I know this is a bit out of topic for these forums, but I think it's such an interesting topic, that I wanted to tell people about it. See attached documents below.

Not sure how well this theory applies to the real world. I run a simulation by creating 1.2 million random numbers in the range 1-99999 in excel and then analyzed the first digit (1-9) frequency. I ended up with about 11% for each digit, totally different than what Benford's law suggested.

Am I doing something wrong?

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work - Thomas A. Edison

Yes, I had looked at it a while ago and I had analyzed the populations of 227 countries in 1950. It was a quick and dirty thing, but here is what the results looked like: Pretty good, IMO. The first digit frequencies seem to agree with Benford's law.